[reportlab-users] Vector Graphics

[Craig Ringer]

On Tue, 2004-08-31 at 03:50, Andy Robinson wrote:

> Writing a GUI from scratch sounds appealing but if one needs paths,
> transforms and bezier curves may not be a small task.

Both the Scribus (http://www.scribus.net) and Inkscape
(http://www.inkscape.org) projects may be of interest in this regard.
Scribus already has a good plug-in framework and a good variety of
output formats and exporters. Perhaps you could use it, or Inkscape, to
generate the output you want. You may well be able to extend Scribus, in
particular (as it already has excellent PDF output) to dump PDF data
suitable to be loaded using addLiteral as Andy Robinson mentioned:

> I would also suggest to directly generate PDF operators (which are a lot
> like Postscript) instead of canvas operations, and to include the whole
> thing with addLiteral.

If you do decide to look into this approach, I'd be very interested in
hearing about it. I've been juggling for some time the idea of trying to
get Platypus to draw onto a Scribus page using native Scribus objects.
I'm thinking of it as useful specifically for a newspaper classifieds
pagination system, but I imagine other uses would abound. I'm currently
working on writing a Drawing backend (as that would be a _vastly_
simpler task and help give me a feel for what might be involved) for
Scribus.

--
Craig Ringer